The Oregonian today published opposing guest editorials on "The fight over labor". (Not on line yet, but should show up here by Monday.)
In it, Michael J. Wilson of the Americans for Democratic Action argued that corporatists in the GOP are pursuing a race to the bottom, where public workers are "treated just as terribly as everyone else." Nick Shultz of the American Enterprise Institute whines that "public employees are compensated up to 30% more generously than are similar employees in large private firms," and taxpayers are overpaying.
I think both beg the question of what public employees are worth to us as a society. Do we pay them consistently with how we value them?
The claim that public employees make "30% more than employees in large private firms" begs the question of what private positions can be fairly compared to teachers, police, prison guards, child protective workers, and firemen. None, I think. I suppose lots of other jobs do have comparable positions, like secretaries, clerks, attorneys, building inspectors. If anything, I would guess those jobs pay more in private industry than public, but I don't have any real data.
I've often wondered what US salaries would look like if they were ranked in order of how important people think they are. I value my garbage collector considerably higher than the derivative traders on Wall Street, but I suspect that's not how it works. Most of us have friends and neighbors that do these public jobs. I don't think most of us, a few grouches excepted, want them consigned to live in poverty.
Just for drill I went to salary.com and looked up some jobs, comparing the range that covers the middle 50% of earners. It reports 50% of high school teachers earn from $42K to $63K. Just for comparison, here's some others, some of which do not require the education that a teacher has to have.
Salary range for middle 50% of wage earners
title |
salary range ($K) |
High School Teachers |
42 - 63 |
Accountant III |
58 - 73 |
Chirpractor |
110 - 178 |
Pharmacist |
108 - 120 |
Casino Card Room Mgr |
59 - 91 |
Food/Bev Director |
53 - 79 |
Sales-Home Hlth Care |
53 - 63 |
Sales-health insurance |
67 - 92 |
Sale-pharmaceuticals |
61 - 89 |
Dentist |
120 - 157 |
IP Attorney |
119 - 148 |
Investment analyst |
46 - 70 |
Stock broker |
48 - 60 |
Everyone one of those jobs pays more than a high school teacher. I don't want to denigrate any job, but to me a teacher is at least as valuable as those. I don't know how to compare benefits, but every private job I ever had covered my health insurance and at least made a 401K contribution for me, so I think that's largely a wash, but one could argue.
We need to find is a way to ensure that our public employees are paid a fair living wage that reflects their value to us as a society, so our friends and neighbors can do those jobs and continue to be our friends and neighbors.
I neither want them to get whatever they can extort , nor do I want them to be indentured servants, with 40 years of hard labor to pay off their student loans. [edit: "extort" was a horrible choice of words and not what I intended. I am just trying to say that I want neither side to dominate the other; there needs to be balance. And mostly their needs to be a fair result.]
We need a way to establish salaries that treats both employees and taxpayers with respect. Today's adversarial system seems to miss the mark; destroying it would be worse. Certainly their are advocates on both sides that are not helping. It's the 21st century. We're smart. We have a 100 years of labor history and more data than anyone can handle. Can't we find a way to be fair to our public employees?